Shush, Boo

It keeps happening, time and again. People using public platforms to challenge conventional wisdom, or to tell a story differently from the way we like to hear it, being greeted not with arguments but with a stale paan masala of political rhetoric, salaams to national honour and regional pride, and accusations of "betrayal" and "treason". And for the targets of particularly vicious and well-organised moral or cultural police, add chappals, broomsticks, eggs and tomatoes. Plus a stream of criminal complaints intended to make them scurry from one courtroom to another. And, of course, to shut up. Sometimes there's black paint too—that useful substitute for arguments.

At about the time actress Khushboo was facing a campaign by self-appointed guardians of Tamil culture for stray remarks on pre-marital sex, the mayor of Belgaum, Vijay Pandurang More, had his face blackened by Kannada activists incensed by a controversial resolution the corporation council adopted demanding the merger of Belgaum and other areas with Maharashtra.

Kannada organisations, including the 90-year-old Kannada Sahitya Parishat, thought "blackening the faces of people who had tried to insult Kannada and Karnataka was the right thing to do". It was left to Kannada writer U.R. Ananthamurthy to point out, "Blackening somebody's face and pulling him around is not how you protest against something you do not like."

Such incidents are an ugly reminder that we lack a public culture of reasoned discourse. And our well-worn claims to "a rich diversity of opinions" may, in practice, just mean groups unwilling to move beyond their own positions.

AsL.K. Advani learnt to his cost, the status of Jinnah as the villain of Partition is not open for re-examination. The BJP leader returned from a trip to Pakistan earlier this year to become a pariah overnight for calling Pakistan's founding father a "great man" and one who had "created history", and for quoting from an August 1947 speech in which Jinnah had made a "classic, forceful espousal of a secular state".

While the most strident responses came from Advani's own parivar, the Congress was hardly less outraged. Despite some thoughtful musings on the margins of the row, the "debate" ended with Jinnah's place among our demons largely intact. How could it be otherwise when the identity of more than one political group is tied up with his "villainy"?RSS spokesman Ram Madhav said it all: "There is no need for (such) a debate 60 years after independence."

No room either, for a public debate on our colonial legacy. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh attracted accusations of betrayal from left and right, when, in a speech at OxfordUniversity, he deviated from the popular narrative on British rule with a few measured (and qualified) words of praise for our coloniallegacy. Once again, the language of his critics said it all. BJP spokesman Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi asked him to apologise for having "insulted the sentiments of one hundred million proud Indians by lavishing praise on the British colonial rule"; Leftist scholar Prof Irfan Habib, accused him of "looking for applause from the sahibs" by issuing a "grand certificate" to Britain.

Says writer and historian Ramachandra Guha, "Advani and Manmohan Singh got into trouble in much the same way that Khushboo did. All three made statements that were eminently reasonable and defensible. They can be criticised, too, but using terms such as 'betrayal' or 'treason' to oppose them is to abandon logic and reason."

And what of the injunctions that seem to spring out at us from every quarter, to ban, gag, proscribe or excise a provocative comment, a film, a book, a play, a music video? Injunctions that come from political parties, cultural outfits, religious organisations, special interest groups, outraged great-grandchildren of national heroes.... Actions that, even when they are mounted by small groups, are magnified manifold by an electronic media hungry for ratings.

Take the Khushboocase. Its most scandalous aspect is not the chappals and the eggs, but, as Outlook reported last week, over 35 private criminal complaints filed with magistrates against Khushboo and fellow actress Suhasini. Magistrates, who are required by law to study these complaints before admitting them, and to dismiss them if there is no valid reason for proceeding, recently took up complaints accusing Suhasini of intention to cause riots and promote enmity between groups—charges that had no bearing on what she had actually said.

Says eminent jurist Soli Sorabjee, "These prosecutions are patently misconceived in law. They represent nothing but a campaign of harassment and persecution of those who express opinions not in conformity with conventional thinking, and with the views of some people. Filing of such prosecutions has a chilling effect on freedom of speech and expression." Adds Desai, "This case demonstrates the growing intolerance in our society."

Other controversies might not be as sinister, but for their targets, they have huge nuisance value, even if they end up cutting no ice in court. Subhash Chandra Bose's 'defenders' worked overtime to get an Austrian love interest excised from Shyam Benegal's film on him but in the end, the court did not give them what they wanted. But now we have Mangal Pandey's 'guardians' trying to get rid of the "nautch-girl" from the Bollywood version of his life.

In the case of Jo Bole So Nihaal, the film was cleared, as Outlook reported in June this year, by both the official censor board, and by "the unofficial one in the Akal Takht, Amritsar". But controversy was inescapable. A violent debut amid bomb blasts in two Delhi theatres led to panicky withdrawals by distributors. Meanwhile, guardians of the Sikh faith were busy making lists of its ban-worthy features—dodgy title, poor gurudwara etiquette, whether the actors playing Sikh roles were Amritdhari (baptised) Sikhs or not.

Having got past the censor board—which is another story—a filmmaker taking up a sensitive subject clearly must be ready to face the "people's" cultural court, and the really bad news is when vocal and organised political groups decide to take you on, as director Deepa Mehta discovered with Water. The film on poor widows in Varanasi allegedly hurt "Hindu sentiments" or at least those of the Sangh parivar and its close and distant kin, and the spectacularly thuggish opposition mounted against it by these groups forced Mehta to shoot part of the film in Sri Lanka.

Right-wing Hindu groups and the fatwa brigade are among the most visible culture cops. The Shiv Sena is preoccupied these days with its own disintegration, but memories of anti-Valentine's Day vigilantism are still vivid. Or of the little-known Sambhaji Brigade's ransacking of Pune's Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute over the alleged maligning of Maratha hero Shivaji. Truth is, parties across the spectrum—right, left, centrist, Dalit—like to use cultural lathis for political gain or image-control.

Witness Mulayam Singh Yadav's repeated barbs against UP Governor T.V. Rajeshwar for encouraging students to learn English, the controversy over Doordarshan's demand for cuts in Prakash Jha's film Loknayak, on JP and the Emergency, allegedly to protect the Congress party's image, scores of instances of "thought control" by the functionaries of the ruling CPI(M) in West Bengal.

Some people would say cultural policing is all part of the dance of Indian democracy and won't stop good films from being made or brave books from being written. But it probably does make inroads into our famed plurality. Says Guha, "I want to write biographies of Ambedkar and of Golwalkar. But I can't write about Ambedkar because I am not a Dalit and I cannot write about Golwalkar because I am not a fully paid-up member of theRSS." Says Benegal, "You work within the bounds of the Constitution, but suddenly, somebody, somewhere, takes umbrage, and you're in trouble. Subconsciously, one worries.... It may affect your choice of topics, it can certainly affect the language and the idiom that you use."

The Khushboo case, as we have been told ad nauseam in recent days, is less about moral outrage and more about political gains to be made by grabbing the "Tamil self-respect" platform. It is also about business rivalry and settling personal scores. But it is clearly being played out against a backdrop of growing unease with changing sexual norms. So are other politically driven campaigns against "obscenity" and "vulgarity".

Reluctance to discuss or modify our historical narratives also has a lot to do with resistance to change. "Claims about the past are central to identities of political groups, for example, 'I am what I am because I hate Jinnah'. Identity comes before reason and logic," says political philosopher Pratap Bhanu Mehta.

So, how do you deal with it? Says social activist Ramesh Ramanathan, "There are always going to be multiple points of view, but we seem to be more interested in using arguments as bludgeons rather than searchlights. We need to be able to use arguments to find constructive solutions."

Says Mehta, "This country is going through a social transformation that is nothing short of a revolution, and to deal with it, we need to get beyond the two easiest positions: one, that opposes any kind of change and the other that insists that all change is for the good. This is what makes all these debates so shrill. An intermediary position could be, old norms and conventions are not sustainable, but there should be some dialogue on what should replace them." But a precondition for dialogue is for people to be able to speak sans fear of reprisal. That requires keeping our chappals on our feet—and laying off the black paint.